Back to opportunities | Category Index
These are the intended use-case/justification for one or multiple variable groups. Opportunities are linked to relevant experiment groups. Identifying opportunities helps to provide a structure to map variables against requirements. Each opportunity description will convey why this combination of variables and experiments is important and how they contribute to impact.
| Attribute | Value |
|---|---|
| description | The marine ecosystem plays many important roles in the Earth System. This includes absorbing approximately 50% of the atmospheric CO2, long term sequestration of carbon through export to deep water, generating oxygen, and so much more. The marine ecosystem is also susceptible to the impacts of climate change, including e.g. heat stress, ocean acidification, habitat loss, eutrophication, changes in stratification, and alteration of primary and secondary productions. In addition, the marine ecosystem also provides several important ecosystem services that need to be understood in both the historical period and in the future. These include marine food webs, carbon sequestration, food production, flood protection, tourism, cultural, symbolic and recreational and even aesthetic benefits. This opportunity is composed by a baseline set of variables that have already been widely used in CMIP6 and already exist in most ESMs, along with a number of selected variable groups whose inclusion in the DR will extend the scientific purpose toward relevant ecosystem processes and downstream applications. |
| desirable_ensemble_size | 10 |
| expected_impacts | Ocean Biogeochemistry (BGC) models are essential tools in understanding the interactions between the physical, chemical, and biological processes that occur in the ocean system. In CMIP6, the marine ecosystem components were used to project the future of Marine Protected areas, to understand the effect of zooplankton grazing on carbon export, to understand global scale marine primary production, to assess the ultimate fate of anthropogenic carbon in the Earth system, as a basis for downscaling to regional marine ecosystem models, to understand changes in river nutrients outputs, and much more. In addition, despite it's significance as the ultimate destination of sequestrated marine carbon and more, the benthic (sea floor) environment is currently under-represented in CMIP6 models, datasets and publications. As the last generation of CMIP models lead to uncertain projections of changes in ocean net primary production, an attribution exercise to identify the drivers of such uncertainty across different ESMs is necessary and encouraged by IPCC and IPBES initiatives. An improved monitoring of biological carbon sink state and dynamics will lead to a quantification of multi-centennial ocean carbon sink dynamics with respect to emissions reduction pathways and the assessment of existing model-based and process-based uncertainty. The combination of core and expanded climate drivers is crucial in fisheries modelling because these variables directly influence the health and distribution of marine species, as well as the overall ecosystem. In the long-term, these data will translate into useful information for more sustainable fisheries, improved conservation strategies, and enhanced resilience of marine ecosystems. |
| justification_of_resources | The baseline variable group on marine biogeochemistry request: - Marine biogeochemistry baseline [marine_bgc_baseline] represents the harmonised set of variables that most ESMs should be capable of providing, to sustain inter-comparison studies (https://doi.org/10.1007/s40641-020-00160-0, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-17-3439-2020) and address the baseline changes in marine biogeochemical cycles and processes. The following scientific topics extends the baseline variable group scope and represent tailored variable groups within the overarching opportunity objectives: - Sea ice biogeochemistry [marine_bgc_seaice]: this is a novel set of variables intended to deal with new ESM features and collect information on the sea ice-pelagic interface exchanges and dynamics. - Marine sediments [marine_bgc_sediments]: To better understand the role that ocean sediments play in ocean biogeochemical cycles and the coupled carbon-climate system, it is essential to first evaluate how models compare in simulating benthic fluxes to better understand model strengths and weaknesses. - Biological carbon sink [marine_bgc_carbon_sink]: the proposed set of variables builds on recent work to bring together a process-based understanding of the carbon sink that encompasses biology and physics (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2204369119). - Uncertainty in changing net primary production [marine_bgc_pp_uncertainty]: the variable group aims to reduce the well-known uncertainties in net primary production (https://doi.org/10.3389/fclim.2021.738224) in order to better constrain changes from future projections. - Fisheries board [marine_bgc_fisheries]: this set of variables, including specific depths of isothermal thresholds, will support the prediction of habitat suitability and species movement, to disclose more insights for fisheries management and the protection of marine biodiversity. - Fishmip applications [marine_bgc_fishmip]: Variables included in this variable group expansion specifically address the requirements of the FishMIP community to enable an ensemble of fish and ecosystem model projections of future consumer biomass and fisheries yield changes, as well as assessment of adaptation and mitigation actions. |
| lead_theme | Earth System |
| minimum_ensemble_size | 1 |
| name | Changes in marine biogeochemical cycles and ecosystem processes |
| opportunity_id | 44 |
| data_request_themes | Impacts & Adaptation, Ocean & Sea-Ice, Earth System |
| experiment_groups | picontrol, scenarios_extensions-low-medium-high, scenarios, historical |
| mips | FishMIP, PMIP |
| time_subsets | 80ac3156-a698-11ef-914a-613c0433d878 |
| variable_groups | baseline_monthly, marine_bgc_baseline, marine_bgc_carbon_sink, marine_bgc_fisheries, marine_bgc_fishmip, marine_bgc_pp_uncertainty, marine_bgc_seaice, marine_bgc_sediments |